The real draw of the artist Robert Lazzarini’s exhibition “Metes and Bounds” at the Massachusetts College of Art’s MassArt Art Museum in Boston are three works from Lazzarini’s scuttled proposal for the U.S. pavilion this year at the Venice Biennale, which aligned with America’s 250th anniversary.
The wall text explains that Lazzarini’s sculptures reimagine ceremonial and familiar objects of American identity — among them a rotary telephone, a police barricade, a lectern from the 1700s and an American flag used to drape the coffins of fallen service members — “through which power,” in the United States, “becomes material.”
Lazzarini’s nine artworks on display, curated by John Ravenal, are convoluted and contorted, distorted into impossible shapes that challenge perception. Each is made in the same materials as the reference object, reducing them to pure form, melted or sundered askew, obliterating any possibility of function.
The exhibition’s connection to the Biennale and its positioning of distorted objects that refer to colonial and midcentury America as subversive suggests an understanding of the United States and its role as an enforcer of a postwar global order that has ceased to exist.
When Ravenal and Lazzarini named their proposal “History Maker,” little did they know it would make history itself. The two were at the top of the list of contenders for the pavilion commission — what in the past was considered a career-defining honor — though their contract was never finalized. A confusing and politicized process unfolded against the clock of a government shutdown. When the exhibition sponsor, the University of South Florida, pulled out, it led to their proposal’s collapse.
The State Department made the decision to award the pavilion to Alma Allen and the curator Jeffrey Uslip, via the recently formed nonprofit American Art Conservancy. And “History Maker” earned its place in history as the pavilion that was yanked.
This “is not the U.S. pavilion show; it’s not ‘History Maker,’” Ravenal said in an interview about “Metes and Bounds” (the term refers to a land surveying system that was used to parcel colonial settlements). However, the first three pieces that visitors encounter are from the proposed pavilion. The invitation to mount the show was inspired by a conversation between the museum’s director, Lisa Tung, and Ravenal. “A studio visit led to conversations about presenting works from the project alongside Robert’s earlier work,” Tung said.
To realize the project, the museum commissioned two pieces from the scrapped proposal: a set of 12 swirling woodcuts corresponding to the 12 sheets of the 1507 Waldseemüler map (named as the first map to depict and label a separate landmass, “America”) and a wooden variation of the 18th-century lectern of the sort used in colonial meeting houses. A wall-hanging fabric sculpture of a liquefied American flag would have been one of four in Venice.
Other pieces are from Lazzarini’s studio. They fall into roughly two categories of distortion: molten and forced perspective. In the molten category, a New York City police barricade stretches and twists in cartoonish noodles in dialogue with the lectern. On a nearby wall, two melty street signs read “Dead End” and “Private Property. No Trespassing,” both riddled with bullet holes.
The rear of the gallery features objects modified by forced perspective. There is a rotary phone modeled after the Western Electric 500-series manufactured by Bell Systems; a gray metal safe with its door blown off; and a wooden institutional chair that could evoke the presence of an authority figure. Lit aggressively with fluorescent lights against white walls, the sculptures are near migraine-inducing in their optical-illusion-adjacent qualities that “take the object out of register and hold it there, unresolved,” Lazzarini said.
Lazzarini, 61, received his bachelor’s in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. He has had works in group museum shows at MoMA PS1 and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Ravenal, 67, is a former director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and museum in Lincoln, Mass. He’s been an independent curator since 2020. Ravenal previously curated a solo exhibition of Lazzarini’s work in 2003 at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Compared to their proposal for the pavilion, their vision for “Metes and Bounds” is more about the abstracted “authoritarian condition that underlies society,” that comes out “even in very simple everyday objects,” Ravenal said.
But the show seems stuck in an incandescent memory of the past. Distortion and delusion undergirding increasingly authoritarian conditions is perhaps the metanarrative for everything from economics, to culture and geopolitics in America’s semiquincentennial year. But exaggerating distortions of everyday objects as a conceit for the modern surveillance state doesn’t get at the shifts in U.S. power — for example, by tech and artificial intelligence companies — that are driving shifts in values. Then there’s the risk that the nostalgia and threat of violence these works channel will uphold the authoritarianism that they critique.
For now, Lazzarini and Ravenal are working on plans to produce “History Maker” piecemeal until they can show the whole thing, somewhere.
Metes and Bounds
MassArt Art Museum; through Feb. 28, 2027; 621 Huntington Ave., Boston; maam.massart.edu.
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